Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool

This is a TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED story from Manuel Porras, one of our customers.

“I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully.”

Let me tell you my experience with CognitiveSEO and the Google Disavow Tool.

I’ll begin a few months back in time.

PENGUIN our worst enemy

Note by Razvan – You can find another traffic screenshot in the mail conversation I had with Manuel, at the bottom of this email.

One of the websites I manage SmartLipo.com had suffered considerable Google ranking + traffic impact with the release of PENGUIN back in April 2012. But the first releases of penguin did not kill us completely from Google’s Organic results. Google traffic kept dropping slowly over time. Until in May 22, 2013 the 4th update of PENGUIN was released. After this release we dropped and dropped and dropped in rankings for our main two keywords. Traffic from Google was almost none soon after that.

Note by Razvan – This is SmartLipo, the site that recovered from the Google Penguin Algorithmic Penalty using Google Disavow

Discovering and getting to know CognitiveSEO

One day in May my boss tells me to try the disavow tool. I was very skeptical of using it, having read that it could be harmful if used wrong. But what else did we have to loose? Google de-indexing us perhaps? He (my boss) pointed me to use this tool he saw that featured an Unnatural link detection option. I went and played a little in Cognitiveseo. I created a new campaign for the site, the report was ready after a few minutes. I decided to import links that I exported from webmaster tools. I just felt more secure adding some extra link data.

Using the ‘Unnatural Links Detection’ option

I decided to run the link classification, it takes a few minutes. I decided to go slow, and take my time. As I mentioned I am too skeptic and cautious (that can be sometimes a problem when you need to react fast). Anyway I decided to take a look at every domain and almost every link, I was not sure to trust the unnatural link report from the beginning. I went and checked with my own eyes almost every link and every domain (no matter if suspect, unnatural or ok). I found some unnatural links that I liked and some ok links that I did not trust. But in general I ended up agreeing with the report in a considerable percentage. Apart from the few links I manually readjusted from OK to unnatural and vice-versa I did not have much work to do on the report. I took a second look (took me some time), and decided to export the domains I marked as disavowed (well actually all suspicious and unnatural ones).

Once outside Cognitive I went and took a last look at the domain entries of the disavow file, making sure no good domains were in it (at least the ones I consider vital: e.g. Facebook, twitter accounts, trusted customer sites linking back to us, some blogspots.com domains, etc., you get the idea of which site you can trust).

Submitting the disavow file to Google

On July 9th submitted the disavow file to Google (made the sign of the cross). I captured a screenshot to show later my boss that I did use the disavow tool as he suggested a few days back. I continued with my life. I kept checking rankings every other day, nothing seemed to change the first days, the first weeks.

The resurrection

Close to 3 weeks passed after the disavow submission, when all of a sudden one day when I run the rank check (using a VPN tool) from different IPs and different states in the US, I saw that our site was raking #3 and #2 from many different locations. At first I thought I was doing the rank check wrong, maybe the VPN is not working and I am doing a local search? Maybe the browser cache is holding onto my Google session? Are these results personalized? I did not want to get any false hope so I did not tell my boss about the news, I decided to track ranks for the next days, every morning. The ranks were consistent, #3, #2 and even #1 in some cities. I finally accepted it to be true as I saw the increase in traffic in Google Analytics. I did not want to celebrate, maybe its temporary, maybe google is playing a prank on us, maybe it’s all a dream. Well that dream has been going on for the last 5 weeks.

Conclusion

Although I have done many things to my site, I am pretty f***ing sure the disavow submission was the one that helped me back in rankings. I could have done it without the help CognitiveSeo.com, yeah but it would have taken me weeks if not months to find out by myself which links are bad and which not, and webmaster tools does not give me many links that Cognitive does. Cognitive is a perfect way to complement what webmaster tools shows you (external links). And now I know that Cognitive saves a mountain of time classifying bad from ok links.

Cognitive is not paying me to write this, I just want to acknowledge and share this story with the skeptical ones like me out there. Hope it works for you as it did for me. If you do it right, I am sure it will.

Transparency Note and disclosure from Razvan Gavrilas(founder)

On September the 3rd I received the first mail from Manuel, (I did not know him until then).

I answered him that I would be interested in his story, but he never got back … until 17th of September, when he mailed me the story that you just read.

I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully. Here is the full transcript of the mail discussion between me and Manuel (for the sake of full transparency).

As the founder of cognitiveSEO, I am extremly happy and proud when people connect with me and tell me their successful stories on how the tool made their life easier.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, our customers, for making this possible. It is YOU that give us the power to innovate & solve your problems faster & better.

He is the proud Founder & Chief Architect of cognitiveSEO, an SEO Toolset focused on in-depth analysis of
ranking signals. With over 8 years experience in affiliate marketing and search engine optimization and 12
years in programming and web development, he has gone from Web Developer to Super Affiliate for large
international networks. With a strong focus on everything that is Search Engine related, he developed
strategies to stand-out search engine updates. His passion for search engine marketing led him to create
his own SEO Toolset, trying to solve the issues that he is facing in the search engine optimization field.

98 Comments.

Hi, thank you for sharing your experience, it sure helps in giving some hope for all the websites sunk by the Penguin. Just to be clear: it seems that you recovered without the need of any Google Penguin (or Panda) refresh?

I was also skeptical, I was using disavow before but without detailed view of each link, just was looking over certain link for me and I delete it from disavow file. In one case I saw improvements, but I decided to disavow all the links before 2013 that were acquired by using old SEO methods. Cant wait any movements after I did cleaning again using Cognitive which were maid similarly to Manuel..

indeed. might be this also : Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links). It might be a complex number of factors. Problem is with Google you never know anything for sure. U could guess what is the most close to the correlation. Tough. The facts though make me believe 95% this is what it is.

Here are a few updates from John Mueller regarding the Disavow Tool and Penguin refreshes: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/penguin-refreshes-regularly/ . If you read the updates at the end, the author’s conclusion is that you can gain traffic by improving your website and its links, but the actual Penguin penalty won’t be removed until the algorithm refreshes its data.

In this case, all of the improvements Manuel made to his site managed to improve his website’s ranking, but in theory he should see a bigger boost in the next Penguin refresh due to the algorithm processing his disavow file.

Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links)
Recreated the whole site, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)
De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
Tried to build new (clean and not black-hat) external links
Improved our Social sites (facebook, twitter, opened a pinterest account)
Corrected the errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools (as much as we could)
Etc, and other things

Are you back to normal pre-penguin traffic levels? Our site: jobuzu was hit by Penguin 2.1 and i am using CognitiveSEO to delete/disavow toxic links. I have noticed a huge number of forum and blog commenting spam < nothing we have done!

Traffic levels are not the same, and this is not due to panda nor penguien i assume. It is related to the lifespan of the keyword. The main keyword used to be very trendy back in 2008-2010. Since then it has slowly comming down over time. Another factor are the seasonal search behaviors. We actually start slow in January then traffic increases in summer to later slow down again in december.

Although we gained good rank from several (states/cities), traffic is not the same (sadly). Its not bad, but its not what it used to be in its “keyword Glory days”.

We actually start slow in January then traffic increases in summer to later slow down again in december, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
Tried to build new

I was also skeptical, I was using disavow before but without detailed view of each link, just was looking over certain link for me and I delete it from disavow file. In one case I saw improvements, but I decided to disavow all the links before 2013 that were acquired by using old SEO methods.

why is it that almost every example of ‘recovery’ involves a site with less than a couple thousand visits a day. I challenge CognitiveSEO to show success using the disavow tool with at site that last dropped 10,000 or 20,000 visitors a day.

I have a client who has website with a very unnatural link profile. They had over optimized their site for a few very competitive keywords. This site has 1500 backlinks (mostly from low quality bookmarking sites & article directories) & 70 root domains linking to it and is no where in the Google SERP. On the other hand this site gets decent traffic from other search engines.

would the disavow tool work if I submit around 350 bad links to that website? how much time does it take to take effect?

Awesome read for sure, Just now before few minutes i have filled the form on your website, have sent your connect Request over LinkedIn, as i have about 30 to 35 projects on which i need your help big time.

Would appreciate if you can look in to this matter personally & help us to achieve our position back in engines.

Must say this written piece is so informative and helpful for me.But tell me one thing after disavow the 8 Spam links; my website shows the updated results with 0 domain 0 URLs.Confused about the information. Is it so because webmaster clear the cheap links?

My website percussionconga.com got hit by Panda on 25th April 2012.
Since then I removed most of the advertising and affiliate links, I removed over-stuffed keywords in categories and titles, and I disavov all the bad links I had.
But still nothing, the ranking is not recovering and if I search for “percussion conga” I’m nowhere.

Do you have advises based on your positive experience?

The website has nice content and it’s a pity that is getting so little traffic.

I think it’s very important tools when cleaning up your site and getting rid of bad links.I have faced with a very strange situation. I have cleared up my site completely from any low-quality links. Any positive response fallowed from Google team. Any explanation comes neither. Any thoughts on such case…? Would be grateful for any advice.

this happens all the time. Google does not respond to all requests. You are left with no alternative if you want your site recovered. Disavow the unnatural links and build high quality ones in the meantime. Natural Ones!!!

On November 27, the result took effect, the visits were returning to normal, but starting from December 17 returned the same amount of hits that was before using the tool disavow. That is only a temporary effect was a false recovery.

This might be because of a totally different issue. Google has some significant updates during these days. For example you could see here http://algoroo.com/ a high flux on Dec 17, the same day you report for loosing rankings.

I’ve used the disavow tool on several sites starting in October and not one of them have improved in rank yet. It’s practically useless to get sites to remove links as they are about 90% ignored so I hope Disavow eventually kicks in.

Razvan, I’m experimenting with your program and so far I’m very impressed with it. Two questions:

1) When a site has tens of thousands of suspect links but no manual penalty, is there any value to submitting the disavowal file without first attempting to get all the suspect links removed? Or would it better simply to change to a new domain?

2) Do you know whether it’s bad to 302 redirect a domain hurt by Penguin to a clean domain? I did this to a site last year and traffic immediately started to recover, but then it seemed to be hit by the Oct 4, 2013 Penguin update and traffic fell back to the same lows level as before the new domain was pointed to the site.

I have run an inbound link analysis on the current domain and it shows only a total of 50, three of which are marked suspect, though I know that two of them are good links. However, Google Webmaster Tools lists thousands of links from the old domain.

Glad you find the tool useful.
Let me answer your questions.
1. If no penalty is applied manual or algorithmic I would not recommend any disavow. If any of these penalties might be applied and they are related to unnatural links then I would suggest to upload a complete disavow file and in the meantime build new quality links (natural) to the site.

2.Google surely will catch this technique. So I would not recommend it.

It is always good to also import the GWT data in the tool to compliment the link data and that way to have a more complete view of the links.

Thanks for sharing such information. Sir, my site ispecia.com got penalized some days back. There are just 13 baklinks. So I don’t think there is any issue with the links. I used two AdSense ads: One just below the Header of page and one below the post title. What can be the issue with my site?

I m running one eCommerce website related to the matrimonial “wwww.lovevivah.com” . This website come in penguin 2.1 google algorithm in 4 October 2013. I had submitted disavow file in GWT in December 2013 which links i fill not related to my website team or low PR links. But, i did not get any benefit in rankings..Can any one suggest me but i should to get rank back in Google.

there can be a variety of reasons. It may be that you did not send a complete disavow file. Maybe this is not the problem of your low rankings. etc. I suggest to run an analysis in cognitive and see exactly where you stand from an Unnatural Links point of view.

Thanks for sharing such information my many site got penalized some days back. There are just more back links. So I don’t think there is any issue with the links. I used this tools and give me effective results now.

I have a website, http://702clubs.com that was making me great money and now I lost my “Golden Keyword” I have been trying to bring it back and am honestly thinking about trying this as my actions and thoughts are just the same as you explain in this article. I thank you for the info and plan to sign up very soon!

I think now it’s required to submit a reconsideration request after using Google disavow tool, I have tried using just google disavow I have disavowed all my backlinks and I didn’t get any changes but whene I submited a reconsideration request it tooks only one week and after that I have got my ranking back.

Very strange. I’ve never seen a site recover from an algo pen without a refresh…. and I’ve done my fair share of successful recoveries. Looks to me as though it was a thin low quality site all round until you sorted it out in googles eyes with various link removals, quality content and disavow. There are a lot of variables that need to be done to recover. Luckily you must have done them all. Well done! 🙂

Well, penguin is dangerous, specially for those who are not aware of Good Link building strategies. They can get hit by this algorithm update quite easily and recovery for them is also very difficult. Being faced this scenario in my blogging career, I can easily understand the pain of recovering a blog from Penguin penalty, as it can months to remove bad backlinks and then, wait for the penguin refresh, sot hat our blog gets free from penalty. Anyways, I must say, the post is quite good, well written. Thumps Up for this.

Disavow tool is great to fix unwanted links, I have no manual penalties still after 10,000 visitors a day my rankings are decreasing and decreasing not able to find the errors I guess may be due to other 200 signals hope ill get some help soon

Hi Razvan,
Today my manager shared this link to me. really i enjoyed reading this useful info.
I did experiment on Google disavow tool, Manually Collected spamy/Unnatural links, remove through Google disavow tool. I think its working fine.
But it is very difficult to find natural/unnatural links. I will try to use cognitiveSEO.
Thanks,
Nidhi Kumari